Funny how something
that would discredit almost any other historical figure, can increase the
reputation for sanctity when it comes to a martyr. This seems to be the case
after a new and much favored mural of Blessed Oscar Romero on one side of the
San Salvador Cathedral that houses the mortal remains of the Salvadoran martyr was
vandalized.

In a certain
sense, the attack on the artistic depiction serves to confirm the reading Pope Francis gives to the martyrdom of Archbishop Romero
as one which “did not occur precisely at
the moment of his death”, but one that carried forward “also afterwards” because, through
numerous posthumous attacks, Archbishop Romero is “a man who continues to be a martyr.”

Another respect
in which the attack enlarges Romero is that the continuous attacks on Romero
show his enduring power: Romero lives, and for this reason some wish to
continue killing him. This new attack is just the latest in a long parade of
symbolic attempts to kill Romero again, even after his actual death. The first
one was the firing of bullets on his coffin during his burial. Another, very
particular attempt was shooting his portrait at the Central American University
during the Jesuit massacre in 1989, a veritable symbolic re-assassination of
Romero. His statue in the Plaza de las Americas has been constantly attacked,
as have other monuments, including one in Santa Tecla in 2016, and another in
San Jorge in 2015.

Finally, a most
revealing fact in this most recent attack is the nature of the vandalism. Photos of
the damage to the image show that the attackers sought to blot out his eyes, mouth,
and pectoral cross. Historically symbolic attacks target the vulnerable parts
of the anatomy such as the eyes, mouth and genitals. In ancient societies,
including Egypt and Rome, gouging out a statue's eyes was intended to keep them
from communicating with this world. The natives of the Easter Island destroyed
the eyes of the statues of the ancestors of their enemies, trying to rob them
of the vital energy that could protect them in the present. In the destruction
of icons at Canterbury Cathedral in 1644, the vandals scratched out the eyes of
the saints, hoping to prevent them from seeing
and therefore interceding on behalf
of their devotees.

This dovetails
with what Archbishop Romero did in life. “That
you may see what my ministry is and how I am fulfilling it,” he said on
August 20, 1978. “I study the word of God
that is to be read on Sunday, I look
around to my people, I enlighten them with this word and I derive a
synthesis to transmit to them ... And that, of course, is why the idols of the earth feel a nuisance
in this word and they would love to have it removed, to silence it, to kill it.”
This is obviously the problem: Romero remains a martyr (which means witness),
and many would like to remove his prophetic permanence, and this is why they
choose to extend his martyrdom.

The real
problem with the vandals is that Romero is immortal now. “God’s will be done, but his word,” Romero said in 1978, “is not bound.” On February 24, 1980—a month
before his assassination—he pronounced the definitive sentence in this regard: “Let it be known that no one can kill voice
the of justice anymore.”

The
disfigurement of the image of Archbishop Romero is part of his martyrdom and
perhaps the image should not be repaired, but rather be venerated and enshrined
as a relic of the continuous martyrdom for the kingdom of God. Romero lives,
and that's precisely why they must keep killing him.

Relics of
Blessed Oscar Romero are on pilgrimage in two different Latin American
countries these days.

In Ecuador, a
stole and alb belonging to Romero have come as part of the events to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Archdiocese of
Cuenca and to pay homage to the Salvadoran martyr on the 100th anniversary of his
birth.

The relics were
transferred in a procession from the San Blas park to the Cathedral of La Inmaculada, where they were greeted
with a Mass. The procession was presided over by Monsignor Marcos Pérez
Caicedo, Archbishop of Cuenca, with the participation of priests and lay groups
carrying banners with famous Romero quotations.

A week of
theological reflection on the pilgrimage of the relics has been scheduled for
invited priests, bishops, the current archbishop of San Salvador and the
cardinal of that country, who worked alongside Romero.

The Curia is
planning for the garments to visit 27 parishes and in the eastern, southern,
western and suburban diocesan districts, in order to encourage unity among
ecclesiastical movements and pastoral groups.

In addition,
the church has prepared various encounters such as forums, projections,
conversations and conferences on the life and work of the religious leader, who
has had a great impact on the Church of the continent.

In the mean
time, in El Salvador, a miter and a cloth containing his blood, shed during his assassination,
continue to visit all the parishes of his native land. These days, the relics
are in the Salvadoran capital, where they have been visiting some of the
churches frequented by Romero during his lifetime, including the Church of El Rosario and the Basilica del Sagrado Corazon, where he delivered some of his most
memorable homilies.

Lord Rowan
Williams, the former leader of the Church of England, delivered the sermon at a
special Evensong commemorating the centenary of the birth of Blessed Oscar
Romero at Westminster Abbey in London on Saturday September 23rd.

Great Britain
has historically maintained a close relationship with Romero.It was members of the British Parliament who
nominated Romero for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.When the installation of Robert Runcie as
Head of the Anglican Communion on March 25, 1980 coincided with Romero’s
assassination, Canterbury Cathedral became the first major church to foster a
devotion and admiration for the Salvadoran martyr.Runcie and John Paul II commemorated Romero
when the Pope visited Canterbury in 1982. The nearby Catholic Church in
Canterbury now houses Romero relics in the form of a stole and an alb.In 1998, Romero’s statue was installed at
Westminster Abbey.In 2013, a Romero
relic was installed in St. George’s (Catholic) Cathedral in Southwark (London).In 2015, a Romero statue was installed in St.
Albans (Anglican) Cathedral.In 2017, a
Romero bust was installed in Liverpool’s (Catholic) Cathedral.

A
true story. Two Welsh countrymen sat in a pub discussing the recent death of one
of their neighbors. ‘How much did he leave?’, asked one of them. The other
lifted an eyebrow and replied, ‘Everything!’

Almost
exactly forty years ago, on the 25 September 1977, Archbishop Oscar Romero in
his weekly mass homily provided an extended and more theological version of
that comment. He reflected in this homily on the biblical notion of property.
Property, he said, in Jewish and Christian Scripture, was something that was
lent to the user. Never absolutely given. Always to be used, rented from God.
And so, he says, the truth is that the rich pay to the poor the rent for the
land whose use they are given for a time. In a just world, that is how we
should conceive property. We are given something through which we are set free
to discharge our debt to the poor. Because if our God is with the poor, then
when we serve the poor, we serve God. When we recognize our indebtedness to the
poor, we pay our rent to God for the land we use. And in that perspective, he
goes on to say, we are all of us beggars together. No one simply owns at
another’s expense. Everyone is caught up in exchange. Those who are wealthy –
in this world’s terms – are those who have been given the privilege of using
the things of the world for the flourishing of their neighbor. Beggars together
we become rich together. And we are delivered from the imprisoning falsehood of
supposing that the world is something we can own, whether as individuals, as
societies, or even as the human race collectively.

What
is given is given to be given.

What
did he leave? Everything. Nothing can be stored against that final reckoning.
And we should get used now to the call of God to serve, to pay our debt to the
needy.

It’s
an unexpected echo of one of the great insights of that father of the English
Reformation, William Tyndale, who spoke in his own reflection on the gospels of
the debt that the wealthy owe to the wretched. We live in a world where it
seems that the wretched are reminded constantly of their debt to those who are
already wealthy. But, as Jesus says in the gospel about the use of power and
resource, it shall not be so among you.

And
the gospel promises liberation from that myth of ownership and control, that
apparently relentless pattern of accumulating resources and not sharing.

Which
is why, later in the same year, when Archbishop Romero preaches about slavery
and freedom, he describes the freedom of those who have heard the gospel in
terms precisely of a freedom from the slavery of seeking possession. We are
possessed, we are enslaved, by the myth that we can possess the world for
ourselves alone. And our true liberation comes when we understand that opening
our hands, sharing what we have, is how liberation manifests itself. Christ
does not want slaves, says Romero. He wants us all, rich and poor, to love one
another as sisters and brothers. He wants liberation to reach everywhere so
that no slavery exists in the world, none at all. No person should be the slave
of another, nor a slave of misery, nor a slave of anything.

This
is the content of revelation, this doctrine, this evangelization.

It’s
easy to see from that quotation why it is that Romero believed that our
liberation immediately projected us into a deeper level of community. Because
once that mythology of possessing and being possessed has disappeared, we are
free for one another in a quite new way. And what happens then is community. A
community in which we are creating freedom for one another, day after day, in
which we, liberated from myth and slavery, from fiction and oppression and
injustice, are set free to feed and nourish each other’s humanity to the full.

And
the responsibility of every baptized person, so Archbishop Romero insists again
and again, is a responsibility to create freedom. We are not only recipients of
liberation, but agents. Not only those who let themselves be fed, by the grace
of God and the grace of their neighbor, but those who have the power and
authority to feed, to nourish, to set free.

In
life and in death, Blessed Oscar Romero paid his debt to the poor. In every
word he spoke, in every encounter in which he was involved, he saw his
responsibility as that of an agent of God’s liberation, challenging day-by-day
and week-by-week, in his letters, his sermons, his public addresses, the
death-dealing fiction which kept his entire society in slavery. Addressing the
gross injustice and inequality of the land-owning system in his country.
Addressing the barbaric violence that supported that system, and eventually
claimed his own life.

He
would have been grieved, but perhaps not surprised, to know that that
inequality and that barbaric violence is still a feature of so many countries
in Central and South America to this very day. And our prayers must today be
with those who continue his work, in costly witness, in speaking the truth. He
himself describes elsewhere the Church itself as above all an agent of truth in
an environment of myth and lies.

But
we should always remember the stress which he laid upon the idea that the poor
were to take their own agency, their own responsibility. Rather than simply
talking about a Church for the poor, Archbishop Romero was one of those who
genuinely understood what it might be for the Church to be a Church of the
poor. A Church where the dispossessed and the wretched found their dignity and
their agency, their capacity to make a difference. Liberation is not something
we receive only, but something of which we become agents. We baptized into
Christ, we become agents of that Christ-like, that Christ-shaped gift of
bringing liberation.

And
that’s why in yet another sermon from this year, from 1977, Archbishop Romero
can speak – as he often speaks very eloquently – of the Eucharist, the mass, as
the place where reparation, restoration, the healing of breaches, the
overcoming of inequality, is all taking place. We offer the Eucharist in Christ
as a means of peace-making. We offer it, recognizing the debt we owe not simply
to God, but to one another. And we celebrate the Eucharist, truly effectively
with integrity, when that is our goal, when the liberated community shows
itself capable of sharing freedom, setting one another free.

In
a particularly moving passage, Archbishop Romero speaks of how this approach to
the Eucharist is a way of restoring what he calls the beauty of the Church. He
speaks of the way in which that essential beauty of unconditional divine love
takes flesh again and again in the Eucharistic body, in the community gathered
at the mass.

Beauty
is a strange word, sometimes, to use of the Church. And beauty is a strange word
to bring to mind for anyone who has ever seen the photographs of Archbishop
Romero’s body, riddled with bullets, and streaming with blood. But to recognize
his life and death as something which itself served that Eucharistic beauty of
the Church is to recognize that without that commitment to liberation, to that
act which frees us from the slavery of myth and fiction, the Church is ugly,
the Church is disfigured, it fails to show what it most truly is. By God’s
grace, in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we glimpse fleetingly what it might
be for the Church to radiate the beauty of God in justice, in reconciliation
and reparation. We, striving to make that real in our own discipleship, are
committed to that vision of the Church’s beauty, painfully, hauntingly aware of
what that might mean in terms of risk for its witnesses.

We
are beggars together, and when we have recognized that, liberation begins to
come alive. When liberation begins to become alive we become people who in
Christ are enabled to set one another free. When we begin to set one another
free, we move into the fullness of community. When we move into the fullness of
community, we show the beauty of God’s act in Christ, and God’s continuing act
in the Church.

In
giving thanks for the life and the martyrdom of Blessed Oscar Romero, we ask
ourselves how far we are still enslaved by the myth of possessing and being
possessed. What is the level of our own willingness to be beggars together? The
level of our own willingness not only to be set free, but to be agents of
freedom?

We
look with thanksgiving to one of Christ’s great servants, who stands with us in
the everlasting communion of saints, who stands with us at the Eucharistic
table of Jesus Christ, who calls us as his blood is shed, to be – with him –
agents of the beauty of God’s people, renewing the face of the earth.

(in the Christian Church) a service of evening
prayers, psalms, and canticles, conducted according to a set form, especially
that of the Anglican Church.

“choral
evensong”.

Westminster
Abbey, the legendary royal chapel in London, site of the coronation of British
monarchs, is holding an evensong commemorating the centenary of the birth of
Blessed Oscar Romero today, Saturday September 23, 2017.Composer James MacMillan was commissioned to
produce an anthem to be premiered for the occasion, a grand ceremony with the
participation of high ranking Anglican and Catholic prelates.Lord Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of
Canterbury, will preach, and Cardinal Vincent Nichols will take part in the
service, along with other Church leaders.The Salvadoran ambassador will also be in attendance. [Moreinformation.]

In an article
published in Church Times, Paul Vallely tweaked Catholic Romero followers over
the fact that the event is being celebrated in one of the great Anglican houses
of worships, and not a Catholic cathedral.“It is, of course, singularly apt,”
Vallely writes, pointing out that Westminster Abbey did not hesitate to place a
statue of Romero alongside the twentieth century martyrs commemorated in its
western façade (photo), while the Catholic Church fretted over whether or not to
beatify the Salvadoran martyr.“Romero has long been a distinctly Anglican
saint.”

Across the pond
on the same day, the Catholic Church will recognize another of its sons killed
in the political turmoil of Central America in the 1980s as a martyr, when it
beatifies Fr. Stanley Rother, assassinated by rightwing paramilitaries in 1981.The new blessed has the distinction of being
the first U.S.-born martyr—though perhaps not the last to have laid down their
lives in the service of Central Americans, if the U.S. churchwomen killed in El
Salvador in the same year are someday beatified as martyrs.